


the christmas party

by impossblegirl



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Drunkenness, F/M, Fluff, also lots of sofa kissing, i'm just really not over the Christmas special okay, no really lots of drunkenness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 15:47:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1108661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossblegirl/pseuds/impossblegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She dragged him away from his Pringles bowl to the nearest mistletoe-clad doorway, and whispered into his ear, "Look, I'm going to do something now because I've wanted to for a while and I am very, very drunk and so are you and you're probably not going to remember it."</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Clara hosts a Christmas party, and there's quite a bit of alcohol involved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the christmas party

As far as human celebrations go, the Doctor had to say that Christmas was always one of the best. He couldn't say he was much of a fan of the Aztec festival of Toxcatl, for instance. At first it sounded like a great idea - the locals dressed him up and gave him free food and generally treated him like a god - until he realised that they were planning on ripping out his heart (it would have been their lucky day to find he had two) and eating his flesh as a big celebration. Since then, he'd tried to stay away from human festivals as much as possible.  
Except Christmas, of course. He didn't mind Christmas. At least there was usually no murder involved.

Christmas parties, on the other hand, were not a regular occurrence in his diary. He wasn't keen on the idea of spending an extended amount of time in a small space with lots of intoxicated humans. This time, however, it was going to be unavoidable. He had been invited to a Christmas party at the Oswald household.  
By "invited", he meant "begged to come and help organise things", but he didn't really see that much of a difference. Clara's father was away for the weekend before Christmas, meaning that Clara could do as she wished with his house for a couple of days. In her wisdom, she had decided to host a Christmas party.  
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

As soon as the Doctor stepped through the door of the house, he was whisked into a chaotic world of cooking, organising and decorating. Clara ushered him into the kitchen where there was a mess of miscellaneous party snacks all over the room. Some vol-au-vents were cooking reasonably successfully in the oven, but there were two trays of cremated pigs in blankets thrown onto the worktop. A collection of random, mismatching cutlery sat in one corner, along with a tower of paper plates. An entire side of the room was filled with various bottles, from lemonade to cider to vodka.  
Basically, the entire kitchen had been plunged into the darkest, craziest depths of party chaos.

"You've got to help me. Look at it all." Clara whined quietly, staring vacantly at the mess.

"Oh, we've got plenty of time. We'll get it all done."

"Plenty of time?! We have three hours! I don't see how that's plenty of time!"

"Time machine, silly," he replied, bopping her on the nose. "We've got all the time we could possibly need."

* * *

He was right, as per usual. They loaded the TARDIS ovens with what seemed like hundreds of various small bites and left her out on the field in a slightly slower timestream (which wasn’t particularly good for her, but if it was helping Clara, he didn’t really mind).  
For some reason, Clara wasn't too keen on the Doctor's idea of getting Bing Crosby to come and sing - something about him being a bit too dead - so instead the Doctor had been put in charge of creating a Christmas playlist while she decorated the house. It turned out that neither of them could successfully do either thing alone. Clara was too short to get mistletoe above the doorways, and the Doctor's sense of Christmas music wasn't exactly what you'd expect at a party (Clara had to assure him that the guests wouldn't be too keen on the 32nd Century metal carols of Kepler 62-F). At the same time, Clara couldn't leave the Doctor alone in a room with a box full of tinsel - God only knew what would happen - but her IT knowledge was nowhere near good enough to get the playlist sorted on her own. Consequently, they ended up helping each other.

Even under Clara's expert supervision the Doctor managed to drop a glass bauble, get tangled in the lights (twice), and trip over a holly wreath. By the time the decorating was done, he had taken off his jacket - _Getting serious, eh?_ , she had said - his hair was covered in glitter and rogue strands of tinsel.

"Oh, look at you now. You're covered in tinsel. Come here." She brushed some bits of tinsel from his shoulders, then ruffled his hair with her hands. A small cloud of glitter formed around his head.

"Better?" he asked, concernedly.

"Better. Except now your hair's all fluffy. You look funny." she said, despite the fact that he didn't really look funny. He actually looked sort of... cute.

"Right... oi you! Oh, never mind. Let's get on with this playlist. I'm still not convinced that some Keplarian carols won't go down well."

* * *

In the end, the playlist ended up with a tracklist of strictly 20th/21st century Earth Christmas music. The TARDIS did a perfect job of cooking the food, which they popped back to collect. Everything was sorted with about an hour until the party was due to start.  
Clara even managed to get the Doctor to change into some slightly more "normal" clothes: although he wasn't willing to sacrifice his the bow tie, she convinced him to ditch the tweed and waistcoat and even put on a short-sleeved shirt.

"So... what do you think?" he said, emerging from the bedroom that he had insisted on changing in.

Clara immediately burst out laughing.

"What? What's so bad about -"

"Oh, nothing." Clara chuckled. "You just look so... normal. It's weird. Come on, people'll be here in a minute."

* * *

Once the party had gotten into full swing, it went rather well. The guests looked after themselves - what with the drinks and the buffet - and all of the children had either gone home or were curled up asleep on their parents. Clara didn't spend too much time mingling, instead just popping over to various people every so often to check they were okay. Most of the time she stayed with the Doctor, who was attempting - and failing - to socialise with the guests.

"You are so bad at parties," she would remind him every so often.

"It's not my sort of thing," he'd reply, "Too many boring adults."

As the number of children and families decreased, the intake of alcohol vastly increased. Even the Doctor had taken a (worryingly fierce) liking to eggnog, probably because Clara failed to mention that contained quite a lot of rum. Besides, she wanted to see what he was like when he was drunk.

She wasn't disappointed. He had hilariously violent personality swings, going from hyper five-year-old to grumpy old man to chilled out teenager and back again in a few minutes. One second he'd be staring into space, the next he'd be chatting away about something spacey with a huge grin on his face. Every so often, he'd randomly fall into someone, as if he wasn't completely in control of his own body. Clara felt a bit like she was babysitting rather than partying, not that she minded. Witnessing a drunk Time Lord was priceless.

Things started to get a little hazy after that. Someone spilled red wine on the carpet, they ran out of Doritos, someone threw up in the bathroom, people said goodbye every so often. Eventually the only people left were the more resilient friends of Clara's who were evidently up for a good night out. She ended up chatting to them in the living room, as did the Doctor, who at this point had pretty much no idea what was going on. They talked for a while about unimportant things, until the Doctor drifted off to find more crisps. Then the conversation suddenly got a little more personal. 

"So let's get down to business. Are you and him together?"

"No, no! We're just... friends, I think." Clara answered.

"As if. You should see the way he looks at you." someone else added. She smiled a little at that. 

"Do you _want_ to be together?"

"No! I mean..." The truth was, she did fancy him. He was funny, lovely, cute and sometimes totally stupid, but for some reason that only made her love him even more. "Well... yeah. It's never going to happen though." _Because he's a 1000 year old alien_ , she nearly added.

Everyone "oooooh"ed in response. A couple of sly grins were forming at the corners of mouths.

"I think you should kiss him under the mistletoe," someone said under their breath.

"Are you joking? No. Definitely not. Absolutely not. Not gonna happen."

She ended up under the mistletoe.

Of course, she waited until her friends had gone, meaning that anyone left in the house would be either asleep or totally incoherent. The Doctor, at this point, was back into one of his spaced-out moods. Clara dragged him away from his Pringles bowl to the nearest mistletoe-clad doorway, and whispered into his ear, "Look, I'm going to do something now because I've wanted to for a while and I am very, very drunk and so are you and you're probably not going to remember it. Okay?"

There was a quiet, slurred "okay" in response.

"Right then."

Without thinking, she grabbed the back of his head and dragged him into a kiss. To Clara's surprise he didn't flail. He even managed to let his hands drop to her waist. The eggnog must have given him a little Dutch courage.

When she went to pull away, he kept kissing until she had to physically prise him from her face.

"Woah, okay, down boy," she said amusedly. "Someone has had a _lot_ of eggnog."

"Hmm," he sighed, with a strange blend of shock, fascination and eagerness on his face. "You are _such_ a good kisser."

"Oh, just shut up and kiss me you fool." He squealed a little in shock as she pushed him onto the sofa and kissed him again, this time letting her hands tangle in his stupid adorable fluffy hair.

* * *

His heavy eyelids fell open a few hours later. He was sprawled out along the sofa, and Clara was slumped at his side, half on top of him and fast asleep. Her shiny brown hair fell across her face. One cheek was pressed into his chest and one of her arms was draped across his midsection, rendering him unable to move.

The living room looked like some kind of post-apocalyptic scene. Across the room, a man lay in an armchair, snoring softly and still wearing a paper hat. The television was still droning on quietly to itself, playing a repeat of some Christmas show that must have been at least a couple of years old. The floor was littered with bits of tinsel and trodden-in snacks, and there was an empty glass on every flat surface in the room.

With a slight groan, Clara began to stir at his side. Her eyes half-opened and she stared up sleepily at the Doctor for a moment, letting herself figure out what was going on.

"Hi..?"

"Hello sleepy," he murmured back. 

"What's going on?"

"There was a lot of kissing, and then we fell asleep on your dad's sofa." he said matter-of-factly.

"Ah yes," she said, heavy-handedly climbing up the sofa until she was lay over him, face to face. "You said I was a good kisser," she whispered.

"Perhaps that's because you are," he breathed back coolly. His blatant flirtiness took her by surprise.

"Are you flirting with me?" she asked, raising an eyebrow playfully.

"Perhaps I am."

"You're still drunk, aren't you?"

"Ohhhh yes."

"Good. I like this drunk you," she murmured, grazing his lips with her own.

"Um, you know, there's a strange man asleep in that chair over there. Not sure he'd appreciate waking up to us kissing."

"I have no idea who he is," she said with a giggle, "but I'm pretty sure that he won't mind."


End file.
